Knocking on Labor's Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide by Lane Windham

Abstract

Reviewed by: Knocking on Labor's Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divideby Lane Windham Lane Windham Knocking on Labor's Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide. By Lane Windham. Justice, Power, and Politics. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. [xiv], 295. $32.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-3207-0.) Lane Windham's Knocking on Labor's Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divideadds fuel to labor historians' current debate about the 1970s. On one side stand pessimists who depict the [End Page 1062]1970s as a decade of "working-class backlash and defeat," when complacent union bureaucrats neglected organizing activity and collective class concerns gave way to an individualized "rights consciousness" (pp. 3, 6). On the other side stand optimists such as Windham who declare that the 1970s actually witnessed "a wave of millions of workers who attempted to organize unions in the private sector" (p. 2). This union resurgence was spurred by "a transformed working class," consisting of "men of color, women of all backgrounds, and young baby boomers just entering the workforce" (pp. 3, 2). Furthermore, the rights consciousness that emerged from the civil rights and feminist movements contributed to the labor upsurge through such legislation as Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which allowed women and people of color access to higher-paying union jobs. When coupled with the vast expansion of public-sector unions, the "tremendous organizing efforts" of the 1970s make the decade appear less like a descent into labor's dark age and more like its last golden age (p. 3). The book's title refers to Windham's contention that, for working-class Americans, unions represented the "door" to higher wages and the enhanced social welfare provisions that were available only through collective bargaining contracts. But while an unprecedented number of workers "knocked on labor's door" through participation in National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) elections, many of them failed to gain entry. In the book's first half, Windham shows that the union insurgency was halted in the early 1980s, not by union officials' incompetence or a conservative political culture, but by a cunningly effective employer counteroffensive. Here, Windham deftly synthesizes a wealth of primary and secondary sources to make a compelling case. Faced with global competition and sluggish productivity, employers slashed costs by undercutting unions and lobbying against labor law reforms while hiring union-busting consulting firms that specialized in sophisticated union avoidance strategies. When the dust settled in the late 1980s, union density had dropped by a full 10 percentage points and the number of NLRB elections had plummeted. Organized labor has never recovered from this management offensive, and working-class Americans, lacking union power, now struggle with declining wages and increasing economic precariousness. The book's heart, though, is found in its second half, a series of case studies of union organizing drives, based on Windham's interviews with rank-and-file activists. Windham's implication is that the 1970s union insurgency offers lessons for present-day workers, especially in the retail and service sectors. In Boston, for example, feminists and antiwar activists formed 9to5, a nontraditional "association" of clerical workers that Windham sees as a forerunner of today's "alt-labor" organizations, which may provide the model for successful labor movements in the future (pp. 152, 153). She also shows that even amid the rise of the conservative Sun Belt South, it was women and people of color who stood at the forefront of union drives at industrial workplaces, such as the Newport News, Virginia, shipyards and the Kannapolis, North Carolina, textile mills. On one level, Knocking on Labor's Dooris a conventional work of labor history—no surprise given that Windham is a former union organizer with seventeen years of experience who brings an insider's knowledge to bear on her [End Page 1063]subject. But on a broader level, the book marks yet another superb monograph from a fresh cohort of labor historians who challenge pessimistic narratives of organized labor's decline with inspiring studies...